Spaces and Places of (Im)Possibility and Desire: Transversal Revolutionary Imaginaries in the 20th Century Americas

• In Event: Geopolitical Imaginaries in the Americas

Abstract

The first great social upheaval of the 20th Century, Mexico’s 1910 revolution, produced a distinctly “Latin American” revolutionary imaginary which simultaneously transcended the region’s (loosely defined) borders and drew international revolutionary imaginaries into the region. Mexico’s radical workers in Mexico City or Tampico, agrarian rebels in the south, rural workers in the north, and anarchists in the west and elsewhere deployed/employed translocal, transnational and transregional imaginaries of revolution which (re)shaped notions of how and where and when and why revolution "begins,” plays out, and "ends." Notions of the city (especially neighborhoods), the mountains, border regions, and even (temporary) autonomous zones played significant roles in people’s revolutionary imaginations, revolutionary sentiments, revolutionary situations, and, occasionally revolution. From Mexico, mediated by Russia’s revolution (1917), the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East (1920), and the post-World War One struggles for self-determination of colonized peoples, through Nicaragua (1926-33), Brazil (1925-7), El Salvador (1932), Guatemala’s "Spring" (1944-54), Colombia (1948-?) Bolivia (1952-4), Cuba (1959), Chile (1970-3), Jamaica (1972-80), Grenada (1979), Nicaragua (1979), and back to Mexico (1994), the transversal revolutionary imaginaries of the Americas figures...and will.

Author

• Eric A Selbin, Southwestern University